Color and Culture Black Writers and the Making of the Modern Intellectual [Paperback]

The coining of the term intellectuals in 1898 coincided with W. E. B. Du Bois's effort to disseminate values and ideals unbounded by the color line. Du Bois's ideal of a higher and broader and more varied human culture is at the heart of a cosmopolitan tradition thatColor and Cultureidentifies as a missing chapter in American literary and cultural history. The book offers a much needed and startlingly new historical perspective on black intellectuals as a social category, ranging over a century--from Frederick Douglass to Patricia Williams, from Du Bois, Pauline Hopkins, and Charles Chesnutt to Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, and Alain Locke, from Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin to Samuel Delany and Adrienne Kennedy. These writers challenge two durable assumptions: that high culture is white culture and that racial uplift is the sole concern of the black intellectual.

The remarkable tradition that this book recaptures, culminating in a cosmopolitan disregard for demands for racial authenticity and group solidarity, is strikingly at odds with the identity politics and multicultural movements of our day. In the Du Boisian tradition Posnock identifies a universalism inseparable from the particular and open to ethnicity--an approach with the power to take us beyond the provincialism of postmodern tribalism.

In this solidly academic volume, Posnock presents the black intellectual from an historical viewpoint, addressing them as a social group unto themselves. Looking back over a century from Frederick Douglass to Patricia Williams, he addresses the myriad causes for which high culture blacks have fought, stretching still wider the discussion of black history in America.Ranging freely across the twentieth century, Posnocks emphasis is on intellectual history, with an occasional admixture of literary criticism&Color and Cultureis one of those books so prolific in suggestion, so stimulating in its juxtapositions, so profound in itsl£7